Two topics for today

This past weekend, it was a lot of soccer, both my daughter's games and my own games that I want to discuss.

First, my daughter's game. In her game, some interesting things happening for a U14 match of relatively low level travel soccer. The topic I want to discuss is the concept of threshold. For a referee, establishing a threshold is important, because as the game goes on, you are measuring what is not a foul or trifling, what is a foul, what is a yellow and what is a red. And just like you kind of know what one thing is in your head, you are also going to be measured on that on the field.

Case in point, the center of my daughter's match calls a foul early in the first half where he then cards a player. The play was in midfield, attacker gets by the defender and then appears to trip on the ball. The referee calls for a foul, coach yells that the player tripped on the ball and the referee goes on to explain that the defender that had been beat nudged the attacker in the back, which caused her to trip on the ball and so she fell and therefore it is a yellow card. Fine, I disagreed with the call, but fine, 5 minutes into the game, that is your threshold, ok, let's play with that.

15th minute of the match, my daughter receives the ball, makes a nice move on the defender and send the ball forward for a pass. With the ball long gone on the pass, she receives a knee in the hip/back area and crumples down like a sack of potatoes. Referee stops play, admonishes the defender and does not issue a card. I know, it is my daughter, so I am not seeing it objectively, so there could be that.

I am not sure if I would have carded that foul had it been my center. But then I probably wouldn't have called a foul at all at the ball trip, even with a slight nudge that I did not see. But if your threshold is what we saw in the first play, then this play was at least a yellow, given the level of contact, the location and the position of the ball in relation to the contact.

Then comes the moment of truth, corner kick comes in and all of a sudden one girl holding her wrist, it was limp and looked off. She had tangled with the keeper somehow and video later showed that the keeper struck her in the wrist and ended snapping the wrist. The referee saw it because he blew the whistle and conferred with his AR to determine if the ball was still in play.

So he has his conference, comes back and points to the spot and then issues a yellow card to the keeper. My threshold meter just went crazy. I know there are times when you call something that the exact same fouls can either get a simple foul called, a foul with a conversation, a foul with a yellow or a foul with a red, but this was kind of off the charts. My only explanation is that his first yellow was an outlier, he didn't really mean to give the yellow or decided he had been too harsh after the fact. And yes, you sometimes have to do that, but it is hard to sell a call if you are constantly readjusting your foul meter. So be careful out there.

The other topic is degrees of DOGSO. I ran out of time to cover it today so I hope to be able to cover it tomorrow or in the next couple of days.